Friday, March 23, 2018

Just the other day I attended a session of the Dutch Foreign Bankers Association, all about Fintech disruption and innovation. Guest speaker Jesse McWaters, who is the project lead for the Fintech programme of the World Economic Forum, shared his insights into the tech-revolution and how this impacts the business models in financial industry.

Banks, big tech and big data: the uneven battlefield- thanks to PSD2
One very important observation that he made had to do with the place of banks in the future value chain. They can choose whether to be a product provider or whether to engage in battling for the end-consumer experience by providing multi-party platforms. In this latter approach, it is a big data game. Both banks and big tech will be battling in the same arena where banks need bigtech data and bigtechs need bank data to complete their 360 views of their customers.

In this respect Mc Waters had an interesting question to us, Europeans. He asked if anyone at the European Commission would have understood the huge impact that PSD2 and obliged open banking will have on the competition balance between banks and big techs in the market. Doesn't this skew the balance in favour of the bigtechs without anything in return for the banks?

My response was that in essence the whole open-banking idea in the PSD2 originated from an EC-monoline bureaucratic approach to solving a competition case between one fintech and the European Payments Council (see newsbulletin).

I also sketched that the implicit rule of the PSD2 appears to be that such access without prior commercial contract would be free, even though an analysis from our Dutch competition authority outlines why there is a good case for putting in place a compensation for banks for the access to the customer data. And no, the access is not reciprocal. Big data companies would not have to open up their accounts full of customer information for banks.

Bunq opening up Apple Pay for Dutch customers but then being foreclosed by Apple

The interesting thing is that we were having the above exchange of thoughts in a week where Bunq had announced to move its systems fully into the could of Amazon (bigtech). And Bunq had also opened up Applepay for its customers. By tweaking the geography settings, Dutch users could start using their phone for Apple-pay.

The fun for bunq-ers didn't last too long though. Apple used its powerful bigtech position to shut out the Dutch bunqers from using Applepay. And my guess is, that its arguments for doing so would be pretty much the same arguments that Sofort heard when they connected to German banks. It would not be safe, there would be no required commercial contract allowing this access and so on.

Time for reciprocity?
It seems that already some time ago the EC course on Bigtech has been changing. We are beginning to realize that we may need to protect our citizen's data somewhat better and that we should not help them avoid taxation. Hence the announcement this week of a 3% tax for bigtech, to make sure they do not get a free ride here in Europe.

It would be very much in line with this new vision towards bigtech if the European Commission mandates open acces to customers big-tech information for banks or any other licensed entity that have the customers permission to request it.

If the Commission truly seeks to achieve a balanced market with proper competition, it should redress the design errors in the PSD-2 and allow banks to ask fees for access and/or allow them reciprocal access to the customer data.